Objective journalism - another harmful side-effect

Jack Shafer in Slate yesterday brought up another nonsense of US media which he puts down to the fetish of objective journalism - condemned here often before: the fact that newspapers don't issue rebuttals to letters to the editor.

The argument underlying this Trappism is, he says, that, if the facts of a piece are believed by the paper concerned to be correct, then that's the end of the matter: paper:

...no need to comment further in its pages about shades of meaning, interpretation, or context, or to deliver a death blow to the whining subject of one of its stories...

(He raises the point in connection with a piece of Barton Gellman on the non-appearance to date of Iraqi WMD that David Kay dissed.)